Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Part 7: The Forest of Abominations
Tao pulled both blades from the twitching corpse. Beneath her boot, the ape gurgled and rattled its snake tail one final time. Poisonous saliva dribbled from a slack mouth. It smelled like the inside of a boot.
“What the hell?” she said.
“You can thank Orthyss,” said Raevynn, taking the time to spit. “This creature was made, not born. Someone is playing god, only they’re using the wrong god as a role model.” She flicked her fingernails in annoyance. “They’ll be sorry about that.”
“More are coming,” said TomTom. He stared up at the tall dark trees around them. Hoots and bellows cascaded across the vine-laden branches, bouncing across the canopy until it was impossible to tell where the noises were coming from. “Do we stay here and fight it out?”
Raevynn and Tao exchanged a glance. “No,” said Raevynn reluctantly. “not all of them. We can come back for these. The most important thing is to stop their source.”
“Damn straight,” said Tao. She eyed the trees as if daring another monster to make an appearance.
Nolin smiled mischievously. “Are they breeding true? If they are, Arcade would give his left nipple to get a hold of a couple. I think he’s been having some trouble with his own abominations. You know, tails growing out of foreheads, that sort of thing.”
“Can we please not discuss Arcade’s nipples?” asked Velendo. “Or push peoples’ buttons, when you know it’s just going to make them angry?”
“Oh, yes, Arcade.” Tao’s voice was heavy. “I’m going to have to have another little talk with him. I’m sure he’ll see that Galanna doesn’t approve of any fleshcrafting. Adding bumblebee wings to a frog doesn’t make it any less hideous than the tentacled wolves we fought earlier in the forest, or the snake-squirrels, or that fish-pig we found asphyxiated near the dried-up stream. He’ll stop, or I’ll have to stop him.”
Raevynn looked professionally interested. "I'd like to meet this Arcade," she said. Flick. Flick.
“No doubt,” said Velendo, rolling his eyes skyward. “But first things first. How do we find the actual temple of Orthyss in here?” He looked around nervously as another series of cries echoed through the trees. “The place is a maze.”
“Nature will tell me,” said Raevynn confidently.
“It do that often?”
“When I ask, yes.” She sounded annoyed. “It will take ten minutes or so. Do you want to do it here?”
“It’s as good a place as any,” said Nolin. “We’ve got a little room to fight if we’re attacked --”
“When we’re attacked,” interrupted Tao.
“When we’re attacked,” corrected Nolin, “and it’s better than wandering around the forest aimlessly.”
“Go ahead,” said Valdek. “We’ll keep you safe in the mean time.” In his hand, Warwinner suddenly grew lighter. Four beams of violet light shot from the blade, shining unerringly up into the treetops. Valdek grunted. “And we’re under attack. Try to hurry, Raevynn?” Beside him, Shara and Kiri both began to chant, and the wind shifted as Velendo formed a divine wall of golden bricks to protect them from harm.
“As much as I can.” Raevynn settled onto her knees and buried her hands in the bed of thick moss. She focused her mind outwards…
And her surroundings rippled away.
Bodiless, Raevynn drifted into the green. She was whole here, not partially anchored into a body that wasn’t her own. Spira herself was alive, she could feel it breathing beneath her and around her, but there was a taint -- some sort of chancre, an abscess of unnatural filth. The forest was going rotten here, Raevynn realized. Something was burning away nature and effectively replacing it with sentient decay.
Raevynn extended her faith and touched the trees. Instantly she knew all that they knew, felt their roots and leaves and sunlight and sap. She could feel abominations skittering through the forest. The source of the blight was obvious, a deeply rotten spot three miles away. Raevynn focused. The temple of Orthyss was shaped almost like a trident, tunnels and caverns dug out underground. Powerful evil lurked there. Raevynn could feel easily half a dozen abomination of nature that Galanna would gleefully help her smite, but one essence there was more powerful than the rest combined. Cold and red. Fueled by hatred and ego and the will of Orthyss. The high priest? Probably. And not wholly human, that was for sure.
It hadn’t sensed her, Raevynn believed. She knew where it was. Time to pay it a visit.
Returning to the meat-case that was her borrowed body was disappointing. She felt barely tethered there, as if she was only supposed to be a brief guest, and her normal senses were paltry when compared to communing with nature itself.
-- o --
“It’s hard to believe that she’s even more irritable now than she was this morning,” whispered Tipic into Kiri’s ear.
“Shhhh, sweetling,” murmured Kiri to her familiar. “She’ll hear you. She’s probably still upset from dying.”
They stood just outside a withered clearing. Nothing alive or dead moved beneath the skeletal trees. Despite the fact that the sun was high in the sky, the clearing was dark and cold.
“This is the place,” said Raevynn.
“Ya think?” asked TomTom cheerfully. Raevynn shot him a look which he goodnaturedly ignored.
“There’s an entrance into the southern part of the tunnels within that dead tree over there.” Raevynn pointed, then indicated down at a rough map she had scrawled in the dirt. “The dungeons are crawling with abominations -- I could sense them. I felt powerful unnatural creatures here, here, and here, and here’s where the worst of them was. Probably the high priest.”
“Chances that the high priest is human?” asked Nolin.
Raevynn just looked at him silently and flicked her fingernails. Nolin gave a knowing nod.
“Hang on,” said TomTom. “I’m going to scout.” He twisted an ordinary ring on his finger, slid a tiny piece of his mind upwards and to the left on the psychic plane, and he shimmered into invisibility. He didn’t move far away. Instead of entering the dead tree Raevynn had indicated, he sat down on a stump and extended his mental presence. An image of the room beneath the tree swum hazily into view: dark painted tiles, a flickering torch, no obvious door, etchings of tentacles on the plastered stone walls, and a huge dragon skull hanging on the north wall. Its jaws were spread wide. TomTom focused on the skull. He mentally flinched as reddish mist poured from its bony nostrils, but he knew it couldn’t hurt him through clairvoyance, and it took only a short time to determine the skull’s purpose.
When TomTom returned to his body and tried again, this time in the northern section of the temple complex, something thwarted him; he felt his third eye being shifted away, probably by divine magic, and he was left with a dull headache and a sense of annoyance.
“I’m back,” said TomTom a few minutes later. He thought his body back into visibility as he made a show of twisting his ring. “I scouted the entrance. No visible guards, but there’s a room with a dragon skull on the wall. I’m pretty sure that the doorway is in through the skull’s mouth, and it’s certainly trapped to bite. Worse, the skull belches mist every now and then; it looks like a magical mist that reveals invisibility. The doorway is almost certainly guarded on the far side.”
“Tricky. But nicely scouted.” Standing in the shadows, the group considered the map in silence. “Do we want to fight our way through them if we don’t have to?” asked Velendo. “Or do we just want to concentrate on the major evil?”
“Just the major evil.” TomTom fidgeted with the lucky squirrel foot tied to his belt. “But is that an option?”
Velendo didn’t directly answer. “And we want the abominations dead, right?” His eyes sparkled with some private amusement.
“Absolutely,” said Tao. “Is that a trick question? I’m just not quite sure how we can do both. Maybe we could dig down to the spot where the really evil thing is, but…”
“Oh, we can summon earth elementals to help us tunnel down, but I have a better plan for our opening salvo. I say we announce our presence in the best way possible.” Velendo’s lined face finally cracked into a wide grin. “Calphas recently granted me insight into more mysteries of the faith. He’d be disappointed if I didn’t use them, right?” He glanced perfunctorily up at the sky in case anyone chose to answer him. “Right? Right.” He turned to his friends. “You may want to grab onto something.”
“Umm… why?”
Velendo looked out at the clearing. “Calphas,” he said simply, “smite this place.” He smacked his staff on the ground.
A thunderous earthquake roiled across the clearing, contorting the land like rippling water.
When the underground complex collapsed, it made the deep sort of vibration that rattles bone. Sections of the clearing sank precipitously. Ancient dead trees creaked and toppled, taking more trees with them and snapping as they fell. Viperbirds and squidbats took to the air by the hundreds, and octoboars grunted in panic as they fled for the far reaches of the woods. Something screamed from deep underground, its voice sounding eerily human, and it kept screaming until a final rumble cut the sound off abruptly.
When the jagged fissures finally snapped shut and the ground stopped trembling, sections of the clearing were permanently canted at odd angles. Sunken pits indicated areas where corridors and rooms underground had collapsed. The tree that housed the main entrance lay on its side, blocking entrance or egress from the complex. The Defenders stared flabbergasted as they picked themselves up off of the ground. Then they began to laugh.
“Can you imagine how much work went into building that place?” snorted Tao. “And gone, just like that!” She snapped her fingers, and started to giggle again.
“Nicely done, Velendo,” said Kiri with a smile. Tipic settled back onto her shoulder as he gave Velendo an aggrieved look. “You could warn a fella next time,” said the pseudodragon plaintively. “That was great, though. Let’s do that all the time!” Tipic looked excited.
“It wasn’t me,” said Velendo with humility. “It was Calphas. Come on, we need to be quick. The longer we wait, the more chance they’re going to regroup or escape. I left the area with the big evil in it relatively untouched so that we could still deal with it. I don’t expect much resistance in the areas I collapsed.”
“You couldn’t just collapse the ceiling on top of the big evil’s head?” asked TomTom, raising an eyebrow.
“I didn’t have enough power,” said Velendo, “and if it didn’t die? We’d be worse off than we are now.” The group ran out across the buckled clearing, clambering over fallen trees and jumping sunken pits.
“Right around here,” Raevynn pointed. “Velendo?” The druid called for an earth elemental, and Velendo did the same. Instructing them only took a few seconds. The elementals worked quickly; dirt fountained upwards and slid neatly into mounds. Within a minute or two, the elementals had pulled apart enough of the soil to create a rough tunnel angling downwards.
Something growled down in the darkness. “Scorpion-bears!” said Valdek, and he waited for Kiri’s lightning bolt before he jumped down the tunnel with his sword bared. There were two of them beginning to crawl upwards. Valdek’s first swing slashed across a chitinous pincher. “Not enough room for them to use their poisonous tails,” he called up. A beam of holiness from Velendo flashed over his shoulder into the monster’s chest, magic missiles from Shara danced around him, and then Tao had slid down the tunnel as well. In the purple light of Warwinner, it didn’t take long to kill the panicked abominations and clear a path into the tiled room below.
The rest of the group slid downwards.
They found themselves in a small shrine. Heavy wooden benches lay scattered across the floor. Instead of an altar, the north wall boasted a huge skeletal dragon head. Mist poured from its nose sockets, blanketing the group, but a quick magical analysis showed the mist to be non-poisonous.
“A religious sub-sect of Orthyss?” asked Velendo, coughing as they retreated out of the small shrine back into a wide corridor. “It certainly seems like a decorating theme.” He indicated down the partially collapsed corridor to the south, where the image of another skeletal dragon head with wide-spread jaws was painted on the plaster wall. They could hear a whistling howl coming from somewhere in that direction, something inhuman and angry and trapped by fallen rubble. Human shouting echoed as well, too faint to make out words.
“Maybe they consider the dragon as a source of strength, worshipping Orthyss as God of monsters instead of God of Abominations?” Tao wrinkled her nose. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter and they just want their ass kicked.”
“I’m guessing that second one,” agreed Nolin. “Which way, Raevynn?”
“North.”
The corridor ended in a second shrine, this one larger and more brightly lit. Black chains and manacles were bolted into the floor, and a grotesquely carved altar crouched like a trapped animal in the middle of the room. Strands of mist hung in the air, and the northern wall of the shrine was dominated by another huge dragon skull. The plastered walls seemed bright in the torchlight.
“No enemies,” said Shara suspiciously as another gout of mist fountained out of the skull’s nostrils to fill the room.
“Probably a secret door behind those jaws,” said TomTom. “We’ll have to ah ah ahhhhh…” His voice rose into a scream.
The white mist filling the room suddenly became tinged with streams of crimson red. Everyone felt the mist sucking their blood from their pores, drawing it from their bodies like so much water into a thirsty sponge. The pain was incredible, and for a second there was so much suspended blood in the air that it was impossible to see.
With a noise like a windstorm, the bloody fog streamed inwards and was inhaled into the nostrils of the wall-mounted dragon skull. Gone within seconds, the Defenders were left standing alone on trembling legs in an empty room. Their skin was white from lack of blood; the hideous bruises wouldn’t emerge until later.
“Nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes as good as innocent stupidity.” The voice was out of a nightmare, and visceral fear swept through the room as the eyes of the skull suddenly glowed red. A few casual shakes of its neck, like a sodden dog shaking off water, and the unmortared stones of the recently built and plastered wall crashed down around the Defenders. Velendo cried out as one dropped onto his leg, but he barely noticed. He was staring horrorstruck as the vampiric dracolich in the cavern beyond rose up, and up, and up.
"I am Gulthora, daughter of Orthyss. Worship me."
To be continued.
Tao pulled both blades from the twitching corpse. Beneath her boot, the ape gurgled and rattled its snake tail one final time. Poisonous saliva dribbled from a slack mouth. It smelled like the inside of a boot.
“What the hell?” she said.
“You can thank Orthyss,” said Raevynn, taking the time to spit. “This creature was made, not born. Someone is playing god, only they’re using the wrong god as a role model.” She flicked her fingernails in annoyance. “They’ll be sorry about that.”
“More are coming,” said TomTom. He stared up at the tall dark trees around them. Hoots and bellows cascaded across the vine-laden branches, bouncing across the canopy until it was impossible to tell where the noises were coming from. “Do we stay here and fight it out?”
Raevynn and Tao exchanged a glance. “No,” said Raevynn reluctantly. “not all of them. We can come back for these. The most important thing is to stop their source.”
“Damn straight,” said Tao. She eyed the trees as if daring another monster to make an appearance.
Nolin smiled mischievously. “Are they breeding true? If they are, Arcade would give his left nipple to get a hold of a couple. I think he’s been having some trouble with his own abominations. You know, tails growing out of foreheads, that sort of thing.”
“Can we please not discuss Arcade’s nipples?” asked Velendo. “Or push peoples’ buttons, when you know it’s just going to make them angry?”
“Oh, yes, Arcade.” Tao’s voice was heavy. “I’m going to have to have another little talk with him. I’m sure he’ll see that Galanna doesn’t approve of any fleshcrafting. Adding bumblebee wings to a frog doesn’t make it any less hideous than the tentacled wolves we fought earlier in the forest, or the snake-squirrels, or that fish-pig we found asphyxiated near the dried-up stream. He’ll stop, or I’ll have to stop him.”
Raevynn looked professionally interested. "I'd like to meet this Arcade," she said. Flick. Flick.
“No doubt,” said Velendo, rolling his eyes skyward. “But first things first. How do we find the actual temple of Orthyss in here?” He looked around nervously as another series of cries echoed through the trees. “The place is a maze.”
“Nature will tell me,” said Raevynn confidently.
“It do that often?”
“When I ask, yes.” She sounded annoyed. “It will take ten minutes or so. Do you want to do it here?”
“It’s as good a place as any,” said Nolin. “We’ve got a little room to fight if we’re attacked --”
“When we’re attacked,” interrupted Tao.
“When we’re attacked,” corrected Nolin, “and it’s better than wandering around the forest aimlessly.”
“Go ahead,” said Valdek. “We’ll keep you safe in the mean time.” In his hand, Warwinner suddenly grew lighter. Four beams of violet light shot from the blade, shining unerringly up into the treetops. Valdek grunted. “And we’re under attack. Try to hurry, Raevynn?” Beside him, Shara and Kiri both began to chant, and the wind shifted as Velendo formed a divine wall of golden bricks to protect them from harm.
“As much as I can.” Raevynn settled onto her knees and buried her hands in the bed of thick moss. She focused her mind outwards…
And her surroundings rippled away.
Bodiless, Raevynn drifted into the green. She was whole here, not partially anchored into a body that wasn’t her own. Spira herself was alive, she could feel it breathing beneath her and around her, but there was a taint -- some sort of chancre, an abscess of unnatural filth. The forest was going rotten here, Raevynn realized. Something was burning away nature and effectively replacing it with sentient decay.
Raevynn extended her faith and touched the trees. Instantly she knew all that they knew, felt their roots and leaves and sunlight and sap. She could feel abominations skittering through the forest. The source of the blight was obvious, a deeply rotten spot three miles away. Raevynn focused. The temple of Orthyss was shaped almost like a trident, tunnels and caverns dug out underground. Powerful evil lurked there. Raevynn could feel easily half a dozen abomination of nature that Galanna would gleefully help her smite, but one essence there was more powerful than the rest combined. Cold and red. Fueled by hatred and ego and the will of Orthyss. The high priest? Probably. And not wholly human, that was for sure.
It hadn’t sensed her, Raevynn believed. She knew where it was. Time to pay it a visit.
Returning to the meat-case that was her borrowed body was disappointing. She felt barely tethered there, as if she was only supposed to be a brief guest, and her normal senses were paltry when compared to communing with nature itself.
-- o --
“It’s hard to believe that she’s even more irritable now than she was this morning,” whispered Tipic into Kiri’s ear.
“Shhhh, sweetling,” murmured Kiri to her familiar. “She’ll hear you. She’s probably still upset from dying.”
They stood just outside a withered clearing. Nothing alive or dead moved beneath the skeletal trees. Despite the fact that the sun was high in the sky, the clearing was dark and cold.
“This is the place,” said Raevynn.
“Ya think?” asked TomTom cheerfully. Raevynn shot him a look which he goodnaturedly ignored.
“There’s an entrance into the southern part of the tunnels within that dead tree over there.” Raevynn pointed, then indicated down at a rough map she had scrawled in the dirt. “The dungeons are crawling with abominations -- I could sense them. I felt powerful unnatural creatures here, here, and here, and here’s where the worst of them was. Probably the high priest.”
“Chances that the high priest is human?” asked Nolin.
Raevynn just looked at him silently and flicked her fingernails. Nolin gave a knowing nod.
“Hang on,” said TomTom. “I’m going to scout.” He twisted an ordinary ring on his finger, slid a tiny piece of his mind upwards and to the left on the psychic plane, and he shimmered into invisibility. He didn’t move far away. Instead of entering the dead tree Raevynn had indicated, he sat down on a stump and extended his mental presence. An image of the room beneath the tree swum hazily into view: dark painted tiles, a flickering torch, no obvious door, etchings of tentacles on the plastered stone walls, and a huge dragon skull hanging on the north wall. Its jaws were spread wide. TomTom focused on the skull. He mentally flinched as reddish mist poured from its bony nostrils, but he knew it couldn’t hurt him through clairvoyance, and it took only a short time to determine the skull’s purpose.
When TomTom returned to his body and tried again, this time in the northern section of the temple complex, something thwarted him; he felt his third eye being shifted away, probably by divine magic, and he was left with a dull headache and a sense of annoyance.
“I’m back,” said TomTom a few minutes later. He thought his body back into visibility as he made a show of twisting his ring. “I scouted the entrance. No visible guards, but there’s a room with a dragon skull on the wall. I’m pretty sure that the doorway is in through the skull’s mouth, and it’s certainly trapped to bite. Worse, the skull belches mist every now and then; it looks like a magical mist that reveals invisibility. The doorway is almost certainly guarded on the far side.”
“Tricky. But nicely scouted.” Standing in the shadows, the group considered the map in silence. “Do we want to fight our way through them if we don’t have to?” asked Velendo. “Or do we just want to concentrate on the major evil?”
“Just the major evil.” TomTom fidgeted with the lucky squirrel foot tied to his belt. “But is that an option?”
Velendo didn’t directly answer. “And we want the abominations dead, right?” His eyes sparkled with some private amusement.
“Absolutely,” said Tao. “Is that a trick question? I’m just not quite sure how we can do both. Maybe we could dig down to the spot where the really evil thing is, but…”
“Oh, we can summon earth elementals to help us tunnel down, but I have a better plan for our opening salvo. I say we announce our presence in the best way possible.” Velendo’s lined face finally cracked into a wide grin. “Calphas recently granted me insight into more mysteries of the faith. He’d be disappointed if I didn’t use them, right?” He glanced perfunctorily up at the sky in case anyone chose to answer him. “Right? Right.” He turned to his friends. “You may want to grab onto something.”
“Umm… why?”
Velendo looked out at the clearing. “Calphas,” he said simply, “smite this place.” He smacked his staff on the ground.
A thunderous earthquake roiled across the clearing, contorting the land like rippling water.
When the underground complex collapsed, it made the deep sort of vibration that rattles bone. Sections of the clearing sank precipitously. Ancient dead trees creaked and toppled, taking more trees with them and snapping as they fell. Viperbirds and squidbats took to the air by the hundreds, and octoboars grunted in panic as they fled for the far reaches of the woods. Something screamed from deep underground, its voice sounding eerily human, and it kept screaming until a final rumble cut the sound off abruptly.
When the jagged fissures finally snapped shut and the ground stopped trembling, sections of the clearing were permanently canted at odd angles. Sunken pits indicated areas where corridors and rooms underground had collapsed. The tree that housed the main entrance lay on its side, blocking entrance or egress from the complex. The Defenders stared flabbergasted as they picked themselves up off of the ground. Then they began to laugh.
“Can you imagine how much work went into building that place?” snorted Tao. “And gone, just like that!” She snapped her fingers, and started to giggle again.
“Nicely done, Velendo,” said Kiri with a smile. Tipic settled back onto her shoulder as he gave Velendo an aggrieved look. “You could warn a fella next time,” said the pseudodragon plaintively. “That was great, though. Let’s do that all the time!” Tipic looked excited.
“It wasn’t me,” said Velendo with humility. “It was Calphas. Come on, we need to be quick. The longer we wait, the more chance they’re going to regroup or escape. I left the area with the big evil in it relatively untouched so that we could still deal with it. I don’t expect much resistance in the areas I collapsed.”
“You couldn’t just collapse the ceiling on top of the big evil’s head?” asked TomTom, raising an eyebrow.
“I didn’t have enough power,” said Velendo, “and if it didn’t die? We’d be worse off than we are now.” The group ran out across the buckled clearing, clambering over fallen trees and jumping sunken pits.
“Right around here,” Raevynn pointed. “Velendo?” The druid called for an earth elemental, and Velendo did the same. Instructing them only took a few seconds. The elementals worked quickly; dirt fountained upwards and slid neatly into mounds. Within a minute or two, the elementals had pulled apart enough of the soil to create a rough tunnel angling downwards.
Something growled down in the darkness. “Scorpion-bears!” said Valdek, and he waited for Kiri’s lightning bolt before he jumped down the tunnel with his sword bared. There were two of them beginning to crawl upwards. Valdek’s first swing slashed across a chitinous pincher. “Not enough room for them to use their poisonous tails,” he called up. A beam of holiness from Velendo flashed over his shoulder into the monster’s chest, magic missiles from Shara danced around him, and then Tao had slid down the tunnel as well. In the purple light of Warwinner, it didn’t take long to kill the panicked abominations and clear a path into the tiled room below.
The rest of the group slid downwards.
They found themselves in a small shrine. Heavy wooden benches lay scattered across the floor. Instead of an altar, the north wall boasted a huge skeletal dragon head. Mist poured from its nose sockets, blanketing the group, but a quick magical analysis showed the mist to be non-poisonous.
“A religious sub-sect of Orthyss?” asked Velendo, coughing as they retreated out of the small shrine back into a wide corridor. “It certainly seems like a decorating theme.” He indicated down the partially collapsed corridor to the south, where the image of another skeletal dragon head with wide-spread jaws was painted on the plaster wall. They could hear a whistling howl coming from somewhere in that direction, something inhuman and angry and trapped by fallen rubble. Human shouting echoed as well, too faint to make out words.
“Maybe they consider the dragon as a source of strength, worshipping Orthyss as God of monsters instead of God of Abominations?” Tao wrinkled her nose. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter and they just want their ass kicked.”
“I’m guessing that second one,” agreed Nolin. “Which way, Raevynn?”
“North.”
The corridor ended in a second shrine, this one larger and more brightly lit. Black chains and manacles were bolted into the floor, and a grotesquely carved altar crouched like a trapped animal in the middle of the room. Strands of mist hung in the air, and the northern wall of the shrine was dominated by another huge dragon skull. The plastered walls seemed bright in the torchlight.
“No enemies,” said Shara suspiciously as another gout of mist fountained out of the skull’s nostrils to fill the room.
“Probably a secret door behind those jaws,” said TomTom. “We’ll have to ah ah ahhhhh…” His voice rose into a scream.
The white mist filling the room suddenly became tinged with streams of crimson red. Everyone felt the mist sucking their blood from their pores, drawing it from their bodies like so much water into a thirsty sponge. The pain was incredible, and for a second there was so much suspended blood in the air that it was impossible to see.
With a noise like a windstorm, the bloody fog streamed inwards and was inhaled into the nostrils of the wall-mounted dragon skull. Gone within seconds, the Defenders were left standing alone on trembling legs in an empty room. Their skin was white from lack of blood; the hideous bruises wouldn’t emerge until later.
“Nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes as good as innocent stupidity.” The voice was out of a nightmare, and visceral fear swept through the room as the eyes of the skull suddenly glowed red. A few casual shakes of its neck, like a sodden dog shaking off water, and the unmortared stones of the recently built and plastered wall crashed down around the Defenders. Velendo cried out as one dropped onto his leg, but he barely noticed. He was staring horrorstruck as the vampiric dracolich in the cavern beyond rose up, and up, and up.
"I am Gulthora, daughter of Orthyss. Worship me."
To be continued.
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